Period Studies

​In addition to our research interests in Medieval literature, Romanticism and Victorian literature, we have particular strengths in Renaissance literature, children’s literature, and early American literature and culture.

Though a comparatively recent academic discipline, children’s literature has become one of the fastest growing areas of research in literary study, drawing on intersecting fields such linguistics, psychology, and education. Research into children’s literature at NTU focuses on the genre’s extended history, looking back to its early eighteenth-century origins in order to examine the influence of religious, didactic writings on the formal characteristics of later, ostensibly more “child-friendly” works.

The study of colonial and revolutionary American literature is crucial to any attempt to understand the culture and politics of the contemporary United States. But the field also investigates broader questions and controversies that continue to shape the modern world as a whole, including the origins of the concept of race, debates over religious liberty, the relationship of citizenship and immigration, and indigenous opposition to environmentally destructive land use.

Research into Renaissance literature at NTU focuses on how early modern historiography influenced the making and consumption of early modern English historical narratives in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Jane Wong’s recent monograph, Dissent and Authority in Early Modern Ireland: the English Problem from Bale to Shakespeare (Routledge, 2019), examines the breakdown of political consensus in Elizabethan Ireland and its representations and provides an alternative framework for the study of Anglo-Irish relations in early modern literature.